Chase Waterman

ENES 5130 Final

How the portfolio as a whole reflects your learning in the class

6/9/2016

I took this class in order to learn proven strategies to help teach ELL students better. I
have gained so much more than that. I now have a greater understanding of literacy in general
which will make me a more effective elementary school teacher. I put together my portfolio using
my results from the Return to your Literacy Beliefs Profile assignment. I significantly changed
my belief profile on 11 occasions, which were due to the learning I gained from this course. My
artifacts address 8 of the changed beliefs, those that I feel are most important.
The Relationship between Reader and Writer infographic shows my knowledge gained
from reading Kucers Dimensions of Literacy (2014). This will serve as a basis for understanding
the problems that I or students have with reading and writing text. I did not know that so many
elements went into creating a text, and I know I didnt include all of them. I had a lot of trouble
identifying where each element should go on the graphic, and I realize that the order should
probably be a continuous flow. I also forgot to include the impact of sociocultural groups, which
has a strong effect on authority, power, and control in a text. However, knowing this information
will help me better evaluate the texts that my students read in class and the texts that my
students will create. I will be able to identify the aspect that a student may be lacking, whether it
is background knowledge, a particular system of language, or the purpose for writing a text, and
teach to those specific points.
With my understanding of BICS and CALP, I thought that teaching vocabulary to ELL
students was the most important difference between teaching monolingual vs bilingual students.
I now know that there are many more aspects to teaching English literacy to ELL students (such
as sociocultural groups, background knowledge, goals and purpose) but I still wanted to know
the best way to teach vocabulary. Which is why my artifact is titled, Vocabulary Teaching:
Before or during the lesson? From reading Kucers chapter 7 and Gibbons chapter 4, Ive
learned that students must appreciate the need for a new word before they will commit it to
memory. So, students need to see the vocabulary word in context, and it helps when they learn
a flexible concept of the word. With this understanding, teaching vocabulary words pre-lesson or
in isolation is a futile strategy. Vocabulary teaching in general is dependent on the subject
(genre) content, purpose of the reader, and the knowledge of the reader. In the end, the
meaning maker decides how important the vocabulary is and whether or not to seek help from
other modes.
My Dominant, Upper class Assessment artifact represents my learning of specific ways
in which schools arbitrarily (or purposefully?) give assessments that cater to white upper-class
students. As quoted in Dimensions of Literacy (Kucer, 2014, p. 448), Luke stated, there are no
private acts of literacy, only social ones. Kucer changed the way I thought about the school
essay. I now see it as an assessment completely derived from an upper-class social group with
minimal application in the real world. To try to remove all context and background knowledge
from a written work only serves to alienate students who need a direct and realistic purpose for
writing. Gutierrez et al. (2011) and the Adichie video also show how white and English are
normalized in schools, to the detriment of other social groups. I had frequently heard that the

education system catered to white culture, but now I know how to evaluate text to reveal social
group bias. I will look for purpose, goals, intended audience, necessary background knowledge,
systems of language, and other elements that reflect the usefulness of the text in the real world,
although I know that this will be difficult.
The How Are Graphic Novels Useful to Teaching? artifact shows my gained knowledge
of why a graphic novel would be beneficial to students, especially bilingual students. Besides
the fact that there are pictures to help make meaning from the words, I now understand graphic
novels as a rich multimodal literature experience. Multimodal literacy is engaging, filled with text
features, capable of profound critical literacy teaching, emotional, and great for practicing 21
century skills (Chun, 2009; Enright, 2010; Toohey et al, 2015). Chuns (2009) research supports
ELL students using multimodal text that allows for critical literacy discussions. After learning
why graphic novels are useful to teaching, I feel confident to choose a graphic novel to use in
my classroom.
Miscue Analysis is an artifact that I created this year in order to place a student at a
certain reading level. At the time, I believed miscue analysis worked because it seemed so
intense; I would record every difference between a students speech and the text. However, I
always had doubts as to how well I would do if I took the same test. I have gained tremendous
skimming capabilities since Ive attended grad school, and I know that I frequently speed over
words. After reading Kucers chapter 6, all of my issues with miscue analysis were addressed,
and I now see that miscues can be evidence that a reader is so comfortable with a text that she
changes the text to match her dialect without losing meaning. The reader is the meaning maker
and will modify the text while adding it to his memory. Miscue analysis can help diagnose
reading strategies that are lacking, but the ability to read a text exactly, out loud on the first try is
highly dependent on other dimensions of literacy and can only estimate a persons reading level
in one particular genre.
How you are synthesizing or putting all of this information together
The order in which this class was taught and readings were assigned has had a great
impact on how I have synthesized my learning. I believe that I learned a solid foundation of
literacy from Kucers Dimensions of Literacy (2014), and the different elements of literacy
helped me understand the weekly topics of discussion. My understanding of the relationship
between reader and writer has provided a conceptual base to think on. I know that I can apply
this knowledge to all students, English language learners included.
When we read about multilingual students in English dominate classrooms, I could see
that cultures and social groups strongly influence language norms and can hurt transnational
students. The Gutierrez, Morales and Martinez article (2009) demonstrated that schools are
turning vibrant communities of different language styles into a dichotomy of white versus the
other. This fits into why it is important for teachers to engage all students (and particularly ELL
students) in critical literacy discussions. The articles by Lau (2012), Gutierrez et al. (2011), and
Chun (2009) all show that school English belongs to one of many sociocultural groups and
deserves to be looked at critically from other valued viewpoints. This also fits into Kucers
chapter 9 very well.

The idea that no text carries its own meaning without a reader and a context can be
applied to many literature topics in this course (Kucer, 2014, p. 381). How can students learn
vocabulary if the words are given orally and before content is introduced (Gibbons, 2015)? If a
student substitutes many words in a text but maintains meaning, are they really miscues (Kucer,
2014)? How can many diverse students all agree on a correct answer for the authors main
idea? And how can teachers value the literacy knowledge that diverse students bring into class
when schools only teach what is important to white middle and upper-class groups? Teachers
need to understand the many dimensions of text and the idea that English learners basic
purpose for learning a language is to act on the world and to be social. Literacy teaching needs
to be flexible, multi-pronged, and aimed at making meaning from text.
How your learning over the quarter relates to or has influenced your professional practice
and/or your role
I will take many strategies from this class with me when I teach 4th grade next year. I did
not feel very knowledgeable about literacy teaching before I took this class, and now I feel like I
have a great foundation to build on. I have learned how to better teach vocabulary, critical
literacy, and multimodal text to ELL students and to all students. I will look at the whole childs
literacy skills and be aware of genre and social group influences before I attempt to evaluate a
student.
What I learned about teaching vocabulary to students will directly impact my work as a
teacher. The example in Gibbons chapter 4 is my goal for next year. I want to engage students
in a shared experience, and have students talk about it as it is happening. I believe that one key
to teaching literacy is to ask the right questions of students. If I ask an open ended question like,
Try to explain what is happening, students feel challenged and safe to answer because there
is no right answer. After students reflect on the experience, I can introduce vocabulary words
that will be relevant to the students life, and more easily remembered. Then I can use literate
talk to transition to writing.
Because of the nature of curriculum, I will have to teach certain books; some that I agree
with and some that I dont. In order to critically evaluate the viewpoints in the books, I can follow
the examples given by Chun and Lau in their articles about critical literacy (2009; 2012). I can
lead students in a discussion about what different texts say about the cultures that produced
them. I can compare American culture with the cultures of other countries using the knowledge
base of my students. Again, this is all about asking the right, open ended questions and letting
students talk in heterogeneous groups. After a critical discussion, there are many activities that
can push our learning even farther, like the creation of multimodal texts.
I now believe that multimodal texts are a necessity in the classroom, both to read and
create. Multimodal texts are engaging through several modes and include many language
supports to accommodate a large variety of student ability levels (Chun, 2009). They are
perfect for differentiation. And their construction is similarly geared; students can contribute in
many different ways to the creation of a multimodal product (Toohey, 2015). Students of all
ability levels will have space to add relevant information. The research provided by the course
readings will support my use of multimodal literature in the classroom.